On The Importance Of Being Earnest

Robert Bronsdon (Hollywood Rob) August 2019

The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James’s Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personæ to escape burdensome social obligations.

But this post is not about trivial people and it most certainly is not a comedy.  Your world is about to become a lot more complex, and most of us already find the world as it is to be quite difficult to keep up with.  If you follow this blog you will no doubt be aware of “Deep Fakes.”  You have perhaps seen the videos that purport of take videos of one person and replace the words and expressions with another.  You may recall the one on Barack Obama.

Well, that technology has bloomed quite quickly into this;

https://www.notjordanpeterson.com/

You can now type anything you want into this web page and you will hear Jordan Peterson saying what you typed.  And while I suggest that you try it out for yourself, I am sure that you will find that the likeness is uncanny.

So now you can’t believe a single video that you see.  You can’t believe a single word that you hear.  Nothing in your world has any truth behind it.  It might well be Jordan Peterson, or Barack Obama, or Donald Trump, but it might not be and you won’t be able to tell.  What do you think the implications of this dishonesty might be?  Well, I can tell you one thing for sure, the end result of this development is going to be a complete breakdown of the internet of ideas.  How can you believe what you are seeing when you know it can easily and quickly be generated in a computer in somebodies basement.  Is that Steven Crowder?  Is that Ben Shapiro?  Is that Donald Trump?  You can’t know.

You already can’t know that Donald Trump makes the tweets that you read.  You think it must be, but let’s face it, doesn’t he have more important things to do than tweet to you?  He most likely has staff to do his tweets and yet you assume that these are his thoughts.

How about a little closer to home.  Every day you read posts on this very blog.  Some are written by people who put their names to their thoughts.  You can trust that they indeed did write those words and that those words represent their understanding of what they are writing about.  Some use pen names, but you know who they are.  If you want you can call Marc Moran up and ask him what he thinks and he will tell you.  You won’t be able to reach lots of the authors on this blog, but you know who they are.  You can research their thoughts and their history and you can verify that what you are reading was written by them.  And if, for some reason, it turns out they didn’t write that post or that comment, they will be the first to stand up and say “I didn’t write that.”

This is important.  If you can’t trust what you read, or hear, or see, how can you use the information to develop a more precise world view?  Of course, you should always come at every addition to your world view by several different angles.  It is certainly easy to take Chris Cuomo’s opinion on the facts of the day.  He is, after all, the most respected name in news.  How could he possibly mislead you?  So you could blithely go through life listening to old Chris and Don Lemon, and you would never know even the most basic truths of the world around you.  But you know that they are lying.  You know this because others are checking on them and calling out their lies.

So now you know that CNN lies.  But you didn’t know that a few years ago.  Once you find out that CNN lies, you can never trust them ever again.  The reason you can never trust them is that you will never be able to tell when they are lying and when they are telling the truth, so your default position has to be that if they lied once, they most certainly will lie again.  This is what makes lying so pernicious.  Once the trust is violated, it is violated for all time to come.  The liar can never recover the trust fully.

And when you finally admit that you are being lied to, you can start to reconstruct your world view on a firmer footing, if there is firmer footing available to you.  You never should accept anything that anyone tells you as gospel.  Always check things out for yourself.  If you hear Jordan Peterson saying something and you don’t like what he said, you are going to have to search his own web site to see if in fact he did say it, or somebody used Not Jordan Peterson to manufacture his voice.  And this makes the internet useless.  It doesn’t just open up a world of trolling kids in their mothers basement.  This basic dishonesty destroys the very fabric of society by making communications and discussion impossible.  It allows deceit in articles and comments.  It makes a farce of news (something that msm has already accomplished.)  And it gives you nothing to hold on to.  No foundational truth.

One has to ask…is the purpose of this technology to deceive?  What possible use could activities such as this serve?  I mean sure, you could have Carrie Fisher playing Leah forever, and you would never know that she was dead.  But it’s far worse when you realize that you could have Donald Trump playing president forever – and you would never know that he was dead either.  Once you can’t trust what you see or hear then communications becomes meaningless.

Without meaningful communications your world instantly becomes incredibly small and it stops growing.

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